As a leader, your role is critical to ensure your organization's success. And while it's often invigorating and rewarding, it can also feel overwhelming and lonely. We respond to the opportunities and challenges facing your unique role by providing thought and strategy partnerships, strategic and operational plan development and implementation, and more. Fully integrate your leadership style, effectively engage with your team, and execute your strategy for true impact on the larger community. Together we can focus on the important, not just the urgent.
Start with an organizational health operations assessment to better understand if your roles, tools, and processes are aligned to support your strategic vision. We provide a comprehensive review of your current state and identify opportunities. From there, we develop a holistic, prioritized action plan to help you achieve greater impact.
Leverage CESO as a sounding board while you tackle complex issues. We have found that leaders are most inspired and effective when they receive real-time support, meaningful tools, and actionable plans in collaboration with a trusted partner. Through a customized approach, you and your coach will alternate between thought and strategy work to achieve your goals.
CESO facilitates small and large group development and hosts workshops for key topics like problem solving, team building, conflict resolution and more. With a focus on awareness, trust, communication and implementation, you can help your team better understand themselves and how to most effectively engage in their roles.
Leadership coaching is one of the most beneficial resources for both new and experienced leaders alike. Whether you’re looking for support on a specific focus area or you want to hone your craft in general, our team of coaches works organically with you to provide a refreshing coaching experience with proven results.
CESO offers fully customizable onboarding programs designed to empower first-time superintendents or executives. As former superintendents themselves, our support team delivers valuable insight and practical application across daily tasks, board and community relations management, public speaking coaching, team management, strategic planning, time management, budgeting, and more.
Effective school boards build cultures of transparency and trust to advocate for students and hold district leadership accountable. But strong communication, productive collaboration, and efficient problem solving often take time to grow. Our experienced facilitators have worked with school boards for decades and can provide coaching or development workshops on topics like problem solving, team building, conflict resolution, clear communication, and more to create more successful school board environments.
Leaders make the best decisions for students when they’re informed and when stakeholders have a voice in the strategic process. We facilitate team meetings to discuss strategy with the goal of increasing community involvement, trust, and confidence in your district. Then we help guide strategic plan development based on your vision, goals, and values. When it’s time to put your plan into action, we can partner alongside you or turn the plan over to your team’s capable hands.
Work with CESO to seamlessly integrate all of the key operational areas needed to bring your strategic plan to life. Operations are critical for the success of schools, and our team excels at finding efficiencies in roles, tools, and processes.
Combat the loneliness and isolation of leadership by joining a virtual or in-person leadership cohort with your peers. Led by former superintendents, you will learn from diverse perspectives while also strengthening both the fundamental and the complex skills needed to excel in your role.
Take your school community to the next level by implementing a continuous improvement process to ensure you are building on past success and avoiding future problems. CESO can provide the framework to help you integrate checkpoints, feedback, and results to keep momentum going and highlight future opportunities.
While change can be good, transition can be hard. Leverage CESO to successfully implement new strategic plans, policies, and projects. Our suite of tools helps deliver lasting change while navigating the roadblocks of false starts, anxiety, frustration, confusion, and resistance.
Hire a CESO expert to be your interim or long-term superintendent or executive director. We also provide key executive roles, like a chief of staff, for critical projects or implementation support. As past superintendents themselves, our licensed team brings unique perspectives and experiences to the challenges and opportunities facing this role from strategic planning to board relations, community engagement, district culture, and more.
Not seeing what you’re looking for? Need a combination of executive leadership services and support? We’d love to learn more about how we can partner together to rethink possible! If it’s related to EdLeaders and impact, we have an expert who can help.
Start with an organizational health operations assessment to better understand if your roles, tools, and processes are aligned to support your strategic vision and foster a healthy work environment. We provide a comprehensive review of your current state and identify opportunities. From there, we develop a holistic plan to help you achieve greater impact and ensure your plan is actionable by prioritizing it into three categories: Do Now, Do Soon, Do Later.
We can do the implementation work for you, or we can put the plan in your team's capable hands. Either way (or a blend of both), you can count on a course of action and timeline that are tailored to your team's needs.
The assessment explores the four categories we think are most important for healthy organizations including:
High impact, minimal effort. The tasks prioritized in Do Now can often be completed by your team, with limited support. Think of it as having all the tools in place, you just need a hand prioritizing, planning or making a conscious effort to focus on them. This stage is often also where we determine pieces to be implemented in Do Soon.
High impact, medium effort. These action items build momentum, accelerating improvement and increasing efficiency. They’re often project-based and may require an investment. Do Soon typically impacts the current or upcoming year, but the timeline is ultimately up for your team to decide.
High impact, high effort. We make sure you’re set up for sustainable, long-term success. Think of these items as your ideal state, with Do Now and Do Soon helping lay its groundwork. Do Later can also include an analysis of results, longer-term planning, and higher levels of organizational change that may require partnership support.
At its core, thought and strategy partnerships are customized to align with your needs or preferences. We have found that leaders are most inspired and effective when they receive real-time support, meaningful tools and actionable plans in collaboration with a trusted partner.
While the overall approach varies depending on what is most beneficial for the individual client, each thought and strategy coach is guided by several key components to build the customized plan.
Connecting you with an aligned coach is at the heart of creating a customized approach. Our diverse coaching bench means we can match you with a complementary coach to ensure a mutually positive fit. Each coach offers a unique perspective based on their own experiences, but every coach brings a holistic human-centered mindset to conversations.
After learning more about your story and context, our coaches build a customized approach including tools, cadence, resources and focus areas that will work best for you. Checkpoints along the way ensure accountability and results.
After working with CESO, you will be able to more fully integrate who you are as a leader, how you engage with your team and how you execute strategy to make a true impact on your larger community.
CESO is refreshing. They have a deep bench of expertise without a canned approach or set of specific products to sell. Dr. McDowell is a perfect example - he’s a former superintendent who listens deeply and then helps you find spot-on tools or processes to address your needs. He’s action-oriented, alignment-driven, and ultimately practical. After spending some focused time with him, I invariably walk away feeling energized and better equipped to tackle the thorniest issues.
As a woman, I’m deeply grateful to have had a strong female mentor from CESO like Elizabeth Linares. I never doubted the possibility of my leadership because of her. It was with Elizabeth that I first learned to skillfully engage in difficult conversations, facilitate groups, and respond well to different perspectives. She is one of the few people I’ve met who naturally approaches coaching through a relationship of reciprocity: she not only guided my growth in areas of weakness but also appreciated and learned from what she saw as my strengths.
Bob McDowell has been a resource for both information and thought partnership. He and his team have found immeasurable ways to help support hard-to-fill positions as well as ways to optimize systems within my school district. I have appreciated the thoughtfulness and overall approach - it feels like a partnership.
Bob McDowell has a natural ability to bring people together and tap into people’s strengths as leaders. He recognized what our leadership gifts were, effectively posed reflective questions, and provided direction when needed to empower us as leaders to get our teams moving in the right direction. As a leadership coach, I can’t think of anyone who has been more influential in my leadership career.
Coaching conversations with CESO always seem to hit at just the right time when I need to get my head out of the weeds to think about the things that energize me about my work. The advice and perspective shared have been so helpful!
As a school leader, I am always thinking about three types of development - day-to-day professional development, deeper personal development, and deeper professional development. Elizabeth Linares skillfully and intentionally balances that deeper professional development with the deeper personal development that I need as a principal. She has a true gift of coaching me as a full human while also pushing me to be a more effective, wholehearted leader. If you want grace and accountability in action, then Elizabeth is your person.
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